The teeth, slick with blood, whole and accusatory. Like a thief through the window or a rat through the crawlspace, they have violated my home. I quickly throw away the photo but can’t escape the fact that it’s in my house. I tear it up, but it’s still there. Finally, I burn it. It’s gone, but like on the wall behind the Buddha’s seat, the stain remains.
• • •
A few shifts later, Chris gets fired. Not because of the teeth or even the Buddha. It’s about T-shirts. Fucking T-shirts. Chris had printed out shirts—with the logos of both Rural/Metro and Fulton County Fire—and sold them for ten dollars apiece, not to the general public but to us. We all bought them, we all wore them. Some firefighter who never liked Chris complained and carried his grievance higher and higher up in the chain until a fire chief and some suit from Rural/Metro got together and agreed that Chris had reproduced their respective logos without proper authorization. And so a damn good medic got fired for a violation. This is how the world comes undone.
20
Rules to Live By
Chris’s firing ends my brief stint as a True Believer. What happened is proof that pettiness can exist even in the midst of extraordinary circumstances. I still love the job, but never again will I be so seduced. I complain nightly to Sabrina, who has no patience for it. We agree it’s time for a change. The only thing stopping me from resigning from Rural/Metro right now and applying to Grady is paramedic school. The class, sponsored by Fulton County, is specifically tailored to our peculiar twenty-four on/forty-eight off work schedule. I’ll be done in three months, so I vow to sit tight, keep my head down, and finish. The second I get my numbers, I’m out.
As for paramedic school, it’s okay. It’s longer and more rigorous than EMT school, and we learn dozens of drugs and procedures—how to intubate, read a cardiac monitor, deliver shocks, and treat a sucking chest wound. We’re supposed to spend hundreds of hours doing clinicals, shadowing doctors in ERs and ORs and on the OB floor, and many more riding third on ambulances. All this while working. I skip the clinicals and fudge my paperwork—so much for heroes. But the classwork is fairly demanding. We start with sixty, maybe seventy students. We finish with a dozen.
The months pass in a blur. I wake up at the station, head throbbing from only two hours of sleep, and go straight to class in the uniform I wore the night before. Brush my teeth in the bathroom down the hall. Then sit and learn about the heart, the lungs, the brain. Why the kidneys fail and what happens when they do. The endocrine system, pediatrics. For most people, it’s enough to learn the signs and symptoms, the indicators of disease processes that are at the root of why your father is unconscious on the floor. As for me . . . lately, I’ve begun to see signs that the Tourist is back. I’ve tried to ignore it, study harder, work more. But I can no longer deny it.
Today we’re watching autopsies, something I’ve been looking forward to for months. When we arrived at class this morning, instead of settling in for a lecture, we piled into a half-dozen cars and drove to the Georgia Bureau of Investigation. We’re now gathered in a conference room, waiting. Finally, an investigator walks in, smiles, and asks if anyone’s squeamish. “I know you’ve all seen the dead,” she explains when we laugh. “But here, in an autopsy, you don’t merely see a dead body. You dissect it.”
The staff cuts up three bodies while we watch.
The first is a man who drowned in a lake on his birthday and whose waterlogged nuts poke up into the air like a cantaloupe. Next is a man who ran over a bee’s nest while mowing. Rather than go for help, he panicked and locked himself in the bathroom. Last is a woman who had a heart attack in a grocery store. I look around. All my classmates are marveling at the cross-sectioned heart, eyes wide with wonder as the medical examiner shows us the offending lump of goop that broke free, stopped up her left anterior descending artery, and killed her instantly. They’re mesmerized, and all I can think about is the cart full of groceries—her uneaten last meal—that had to be solemnly restocked by a fifteen-year-old making